Category Archives: Pacific Northwest

Living Wisdom from Coast Salish Elders: Excerpts from Jesintel by Children of the Setting Sun Productions

Jesintel gathers the cultural teachings of nineteen Coast Salish elders for new generations. Collaboration is at the heart of this work by Native-owned and -operated Children of the Setting Sun Productions, who came together with their community to honor the boundless relations of Coast Salish people and their territories.

Jesintel—”to learn and grow together”—characterizes the spirit of the book, which includes photographs and interviews that share powerful experiences and stories. In the excerpts below, elders reflect on identity, education, and the importance of storytelling. Throughout the book, they offer their perspectives on language revitalization, Coast Salish family values and naming practices, salmon, sovereignty, and canoe racing. They also reveal traumatic memories, including of their boarding school experiences and the epidemics that ravished their communities.

Those featured here as well as other participating elders will be honored at the book launch on April 17, 4:30–6:30 pm, at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House. Find more information about upcoming events below.

Elaine Grinell (Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe) on the Importance of Storytelling

I learned storytelling at a young age, but I didn’t utilize it. I thought that was just for me. I thought that was just mine. And I didn’t learn until, oh, I was probably twenty-four or twenty-five when I realized that this was for me to give to someone else too—my whole family, you know. These things seep out. They just seep. Actually, I don’t know whether you realize how much you really do know until pretty late in life, and that it’s important, that I better stick with that, I’m good at that, I’d better continue.

Elaine shares stories at her home in S’Klallam [Photo by Beau Garreau]

I started in the Port Angeles school district, and now I have carried our stories and songs to Africa, Prague, Bangkok, Japan, and Alaska, way out on Saint Lawrence Island. Africa was fun. I got along really well with the people. They were really interested in Indians. They just really liked the Native Americans. They had thought we were extinct and they were quite surprised when one of us turned up at their hut.

Grandpa Prince would build a fire in the cast-iron woodstove, and those stoves have leaks in them. They’re just little openings and cracks, and the firelight would flicker through. So the three of us—Grandma, Grandpa, and me—would sit there, and he would peel apples, and that flame would hit his face, and it would just flicker, and Grandma would flicker. And I’d watch them, and he would tell stories. I was just, ah . . . mesmerized, totally taken in, and I thought, I have to remember.

Nolan Charles (Musqueam Indian Band) on Salish Identity

Language—it gives you your identity. It’s one. And it’s the resources. Like, we look at the Salish Sea. “Is that our soup bowl? The sea urchins, the octopus, the salmon, the halibut—all those things that we draw from the Salish Sea that sustain us?”

Those nourish us, but it’s also the things like the cedar tree that we use to build our canoes, to build our longhouses. We fashion mats and hats and clothing from cedar and from bulrushes from the mouths of the rivers. Those also provide us with clothing and mats and things like that. It’s all part and parcel. But language is probably the key that gives you your identity, connecting all of these. It will help our little ones prepare themselves for the next battle.

Nolan Charles [Photo by Beau Garreau]

Virginia Cross (Muckleshoot Tribe) on Education

I went to the University of Puget Sound and then got a master’s degree in education at the University of Washington in curriculum and instruction. I started the Virginia Cross Program when I was with the Auburn School District in the 1980s, and it has grown. It’s now known as the Virginia Cross Native American Education Center. When I started the program, we had a lot of kids who had dropped out of school, and we designed the program to serve the cultural, social, and academic needs of teenagers who weren’t in school. The program now supports students from over seventy tribes across a range of areas that are all connected. It’s important for our tribal students and future leaders to learn and share their culture as part of their education. It’s important to share this with non-tribal students and neighboring community members.

Virginia is most proud that the Muckleshoot people have come “from nothing” and overcome “struggle and uncertainty.” [Photo by Beau Garreau]

I have a lot of hope for the new legislation requiring Washington State public schools to offer a Native Education curriculum. We helped. Our lobbyists worked really hard on that. When it was signed, we went to the signing ceremony. If the public schools follow through and teach what they’re supposed to be teaching—the history of how tribal sovereignty came to be, treaty rights, Native science, opportunities to learn our traditional languages, opportunities to participate in traditional practices—then I think that our kids will have an easier time than we did at school. I worked for the Auburn School District for over twenty years, so I know very well the kinds of history books they approve and are distributed into our school system. Nothing has to do with tribal history or the plants you might gather. They don’t mention anything about Muckleshoot tribe or hardly any Indian tribe. They don’t recognize that we have our own constitution and bylaws—they only study the US Constitution. They also celebrated holidays that we don’t honor—Columbus Day, now Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I don’t think they have treated our kids well for their special needs.

I’m thinking back to when I was in school. I graduated in 1957, and at that time I was the only Muckleshoot graduate. My sister two years before me was the only Muckleshoot graduate. We would start in kindergarten with ten or fifteen tribal people, and by the time we were out of the eighth or ninth grade, they would all be gone. It just didn’t serve our kids or our people well.

I think there was just so much prejudice. There were very few of us who were in high school at that time, probably not more than ten of us in the whole school of thousands of kids. Our dad wanted us to be in school, that’s why we were there.

I think it’s the education department that has really progressed, mostly because that’s where our primary interest has been. We now have a tribal school and a Lushootseed language program with a program director, where we teach and qualify five full-time language teachers every year, who then go out to teach. And now we have hired another five more. Hopefully we’ll end up with everybody speaking Lushootseed language. And hopefully this work will continue.

Upcoming Events

April 17, 4:30–6:30 pm, Book Launch at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House (UW Seattle): The program will feature selected readings from Jesintel and an evocative drumming ceremony honoring elders in attendance whose narratives are presented in the book: Steve and Gwen Point, Gene Harry, Nolan Charles, Elaine Grinell, Virginia Cross, Nancy Shippentower, and Jewell James. Books will be available for purchase from the University Book Store.

April 28, 7:00–8:00 pm, Village Books (Bellingham): Join Darrell Hillaire, executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions, and editors of the book for a reading and book signing in the Village Books Readings Gallery. This event is part of the Nature of Writing series, a partnership between Village Books and the North Cascades Institute.

Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon: Q&A with Ryan P. Kelly, Terrie Klinger and John J. Meyer

A spectacular variety of life flourishes between the ebb and flow of high and low tide. Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon uncovers the hidden workings of the natural world of the shoreline. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, the guide illuminates the scientific forces that shape the diversity of life at beaches and tidepools.

Ryan P. Kelly is associate professor in the University of Washington’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. Terrie Klinger is professor in the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. John J. Meyer is Senior Director for Marketing and Communications for the UW’s College of the Environment.

Can you tell us a bit about Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon and what motivated you to write the book? How does it differ from other coastal guides?

Terrie Klinger: This book is about the wonder of the intertidal environment, why it is unlike any other on Earth, and the seaweeds and animals that have evolved to live in such a place. We wanted to share that wonder with others who might not be marine scientists. The title evokes Ed Ricketts’s Between Pacific Tides. Published in 1939, Ricketts’s book is widely held to be the classic in the field. We wanted to honor that book and the lasting influence it has had on each of us.

John J. Meyer: The Pacific Northwest is brimming with so much incredible life and beauty between the tides—the diversity of marine invertebrates and seaweeds is just stunning. We wanted to shine a light on these special places, which many folks don’t discover unless they just happen to be at a good rocky beach on a good low tide. A little planning can unlock a world you never knew was there!

Ryan P. Kelly: This book is an attempt to tell people why the species at the shore are where they are, rather than simply being another guide about what one might find there. It’s about ecology, about process. That’s pretty unusual in a book for non-specialists.

There’s a degree of order to the apparent messiness of life along the shore, and uncovering the hidden rules that result in that order is really exciting.

Ryan P. Kelly

What are the main themes of the book and how are they brought to life?

Kelly: We wanted to show, rather than tell. While the themes are those that you might find in a course on marine ecology, we tried to bring those to life by highlighting examples that the reader might run across during a visit to particular places. That was the power of using individual places along the coast as a way to illustrate processes that happen in many other places as well.

Klinger: Intertidal habitats and the species that occupy them are our focus. Habitats determine who can live where, and once occupied, the residents in turn shape their habitats—like your neighbors shape your neighborhood. We try to shed some light on these complexities.

Meyer: To support showing not telling, this book is filled with many photos that are more than just pretty pictures; they are meant to visually bring the vignettes we write about to life.

Who is this book for and how would you recommend readers approach it?

Kelly: The book is for everyone! Mostly non-scientists, but the kinds of curious, outdoorsy people that might find themselves at the shore. We ended up with a lot of text at the beginning that bears reading straight through, but the geographically specific chapters are meant to be read in bits, perhaps as the reader is headed out on a road trip.

Klinger: Nearly anyone who likes to stroll along on the beach, stumble across slick rocks, and explore out-of-the way places along the Washington and Oregon coasts might find something of interest in this book. Readers can jump around to find fun facts and satisfy their curiosity or read from cover to cover for a consistent narrative. My friend Jane, who just celebrated her hundredth birthday, read all the place-based chapters before diving into the first two chapters.

Meyer: This book is meant for people who love to discover new things. So much of what’s living in the intertidal looks and behaves like nothing else, it’s almost like discovering organisms from another planet here on Earth.

Surfgrass (Phyllospadix sp.) grows alongside subtidal kelp (Laminaria setchellii) at Ecola State Park in Oregon.

Which location or site in the book is your favorite to visit and why?

Meyer: Second Beach in Olympic National Park is a favorite. I discovered it nearly thirty years ago while on a road trip and have gone camping there every summer since. I always couple my visit with a good low tide for some excellent tidepooling, which is backdropped against a spectacularly beautiful location.

Kelly: I just fell in love with Ecola State Park in Oregon during a research trip, and I’ve been back since. What a beautiful place.

Klinger: The rocky sites are my clear favorites. They’re chock-full of interesting species arranged in ways that beg for investigation and explanation.

What’s your favorite species profiled in the book? Are there any fun facts that you’d like to share?

Kelly: I did my PhD on chitons, and so I suppose I can’t resist a good chiton. Tonicella lineata, the lined chiton, is probably the most beautiful thing you’re likely to see on the outer coast.

Meyer: A friend of mine introduced me to the sea palm, Postelsia palmaeformis, years ago, and it’s been a favorite ever since. Watching hundreds of them getting bowled over by crashing waves and then pop back up is one of my favorite things to see.

Klinger: There are some fun facts for sure—for instance, the story about the horse stuck in a sea of foam—and I have a ton of favorite species. One favorite is the air-breathing sea slug called Onchidella—I’m always excited to find one.

The sea palm (Postelsia palmaeformis) grows among mussels and barnacles on wave-swept shores.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Klinger: I might hope readers deepen their curiosity about life in the intertidal and the puzzling complexity of nature all around us.

Kelly: A sense of wonder, really. But also a sense that there are answers to questions like “why is this snail here, but not over there?” There’s a degree of order to the apparent messiness of life along the shore, and uncovering the hidden rules that result in that order is really exciting.

Meyer: I think once you understand something a bit more, you care about it a bit more. I hope readers walk away indeed with a sense of wonder that also translates to stewardship.

Upcoming Events

April 11, 6:00 pm at the University Book Store: Learn more about the intertidal zone at an author talk with Terrie Klinger and Ryan P. Kelly. Register for this free event here.

May 13, 11:00 am–4:00 pm, at Friday Harbor Laboratories Open House: The San Juan Island marine biology field station of the UW College of the Environment, Friday Harbor Labs, invites the community to their annual Open House. Guests may meander about the campus and experience touch tanks, science demonstrations, seaweed pressing, and a science speaker series that will include a talk with Terrie Klinger. Visit the FHL news and events page and stay tuned for more details!

Black History Month Book List

In celebration of Black History Month, we invite you to check out recent books as well as select titles from our backlist in Pacific Northwest, African American, and Black Diaspora historical studies that speak to the profound legacy of Black Americans and this year’s theme of Black resistance.

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, this book chronicles how Alaska’s Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—determination, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

University of Washington Emeritus Professor of American History Quintard Taylor’s meticulously researched account is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest. The second edition features a new foreword and afterword.

Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington

Born from a national movement in the late 1960s seeking to address structural and cultural racism, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D) started as a core group of Black Student Union leaders at the UW who demanded changes in how the school served students of color. In a new book releasing February 21, legendary founding member Emile Pitre shares deep insight into the making of the institution through candid interviews, letters, and reflections of those who participated across decades.

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

In this rich narrative, Daudi Abe draws on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how hip hop flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs.

The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City

Combining histories of the city and its African American community with interviews with former Portland Panthers and other key players, this long-overdue account adds complexity to our understanding of the protracted civil rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

Beginning with the 1971 appearance of the first Black female superheroine in a comic book—the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly”—artist, curator, and writer Deborah Elizabeth Waley examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Through interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue and laid the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, this volume explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence

Artist Barbara Earl Thomas’s body of work collected here offers a reexamination of Black portraiture and the preconceived dichotomies of innocence and guilt and sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.

New and Forthcoming Books

From the frontier of health and homelessness in Seattle to nineteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia, our new and upcoming books span the globe to illuminate histories and provide new studies and perspectives on pressing issues. Learn more about these recently released and forthcoming books below.

Don’t forget that our Holiday Sale is ongoing through January 31. Get 40% off all books and free domestic shipping when you order through our website with code WINTER22 at checkout.

Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico

In the first comprehensive study of queer lives in twentieth-century New Mexico, Jordan Biro Walters explores how land communes, art circles, and university classrooms helped create communities that supported queer cultural expression and launched gay civil rights activism in the American Southwest. Wide-Open Desert also frames the significance of and relationship between queer mobility and queer creative production as paths to political, cultural, and sexual freedom for LGBTQ+ people across the nation. In doing so, the book reassesses the power of urbanism on the social construction of contemporary notions of queer identities and politics.

Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

Newly released in paperback, this Washington State Book Award Finalist explores the tensions between caregiving and oppression, as well as charity and solidarity, that polarize perspectives on homelessness throughout the country. Author and University of Washington professor of nursing Josephine Ensign uses extensive historical research to piece together the lives and deaths of those not included in official histories of Seattle, a city with one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. Drawing on interviews, she also shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health and social care and public policy debates.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? Historian Faizah Zakaria explores these questions and the history of ecological change in the region by centering the roles of religion and colonialism in shaping the Anthropocene. Using a wide array of sources such as family histories, prayer manuscripts, and folktales in tandem with colonial and ethnographic archives, Zakaria brings everyday religion and its far-flung implications into our understanding of the environmental history of the modern world.

Material Contradictions in Mao’s China

This first volume devoted to the material history of the Mao period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough. Editors Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho bring together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more to share groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film.

Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, and Ping Yao, the volume includes an array of engaging and readable works that draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century.

An open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

The Hauntings of Local History: Peter Boag on “Pioneering Death”

Admittedly, I see the world in terms of darkness rather than light, and in history as in life, I am drawn more to stories of human pathos than to tales of human triumph. I am bemused by “rosy retrospection”—the penchant of many to reflect on the positives of the past rather than on the negatives and to also, therefore, see the past as somehow better than the present.

Darkness, pathos, and the folly of rosy retrospection comprise the foundation of Pioneering Death. It tells the story of Loyd Montgomery, an impoverished eighteen-year-old who shot and killed his parents and a visiting neighbor on his family’s farm near the western Oregon town of Brownsville late on the fair autumn day of November 19, 1895. Little more than two months later, on a cool morning and just as the rising sun gilded the eastern sky above the Cascade Range, Loyd met his own end on gallows erected adjacent to the Linn County jail in the county seat of Albany.

I first became aware of the Montgomery murders when, back in the early 1980s, I began researching my own family’s history as connected to Brownsville, a community whose origins are rooted in the arrival there in the 1840s of its first white American settlers who came by way of wagons on the overland trails. When I began my work, local historians, the librarian, and museum docents who befriended me mentioned the murders. Given that the Montgomerys were among the most esteemed early American settlers of the area, when these local authorities spoke of that past tragedy, they did so more in hushed tones and as an aside to the official, celebratory “pioneer” history of that community. Clearly, Loyd’s grim tale haunted Brownsville long after it had happened. It took me close to four decades of intermittent research and unremitting reflection to figure out why.

My own digging, so-called, into the Montgomery murders began by accident on January 10, 1987. It was a dreary and rainy Saturday morning when I appeared at the Linn County Historical Museum in Brownsville to conduct research in its collections for my doctoral dissertation. That project later became my first book, and it focused on the environmental history of the southern Willamette Valley. (The reader will detect a clear pattern by now: my preoccupation with history—my need to make sense of its shadows—has taken me back time and again to Brownsville.) The gloominess of that January day and the relative darkness of the room in which I labored provided an atmosphere fitting for what I chanced upon—a photocopy of the special edition of the Brownsville Times for November 20, 1895. Its sole article is entitled “A TRIPPLE MURDER.” It was the first account of that crime to appear anywhere. It was also the one written closest to the event and by someone whose very eyes beheld the aftermath of the tragedy within hours of its commission. Sadly, only random issues from the 1890s of that newspaper are preserved. No issue among those, other than this fragment, comes from the period when the Montgomery murders otherwise lit up the headlines of papers in communities up and down the West Coast.

Albert Cavender, its writer, was the editor of the Brownsville paper. It took some time for word of the violent killings to make its way to his offices. By then, night had already fallen. But the resourceful newsman reached out to local boys—similar in age to the murderer—who, on horseback and with lanterns they must have grasped as tightly as anxiety gripped them, illuminated the way for the journalist as he headed up the country lane into this local heart of darkness. Cavender’s description of the landscape of death that he found there beguiled me—the bodies and the blood; desiccated hop vines in surrounding fields yet clinging to their poles long since the late summer harvest had ended; the Montgomery family’s forlorn and weathered house sitting beneath the sprawling limbs of an immense maple tree; and the canine companion of the neighbor-victim that took up vigil at his slaughtered master’s side, refusing to be lured from it. Those forbidding images and so many others in that two-page document bespoke the poverty, tragedy, darkness, and pathos not just of the victims and the boy murderer but of their community, the larger region, and even the nation.

Cavender’s story had nothing to do with my dissertation’s subject. But it so haunted me that I took a copy of it, promising myself that one day I would do something with it. For the next three decades and more, Loyd Montgomery became an unwelcome companion to me as I struggled to piece together who he was, what he did, how he and his violent actions fit into history, and how to craft a coherent story from it all. As it turned out, I needed those years—time spent at four universities, countless hours in the classroom, and intervals for producing three other books on quite different topics—to collect the research and, more, come to comprehend why Loyd haunted me as much as he did the community that he was more a part of than he was apart from.

Apart from rather than a part of community history is how local memory preferred it. The vast literature that exists on matricide and patricide, moreover, fortifies that construction. That is, psychology, criminology, and other social sciences that dominate parricide studies are by nature disciplines that, with rare exception, are disinterested in the larger, historical forces that I have come to understand contribute mightily to why children have more than occasionally killed their parents. Local tradition and the traditional approaches to explaining parricide had worked together—intentionally, defensively, or both—to bury the truth so deeply about Loyd that I simply needed the time and the education that time affords to unearth it.

As I excavated Loyd’s life, slowly peeling back the accumulated layers of historical and disciplinary sediments and sentiments, a much darker tale revealed itself than simply that of an isolated, though horribly gruesome anecdote. His story is really the underbelly of so many a local Oregon history (and local histories elsewhere in North America) that celebrate the “pioneer” foundations of community, state, and nation. Constructing these histories involved willfully burying the truth about the brutal, murderous, and even genocidal nature of them. But more, the violent expressions within Oregon “pioneer” families were in reality and are in the very wanton act of trying to forget them, an integral part of the story of American-settler violence against Indigenous people. The messy, unresolved, and troubling tension between the darkness of reality and the human need for rosy reflection in all this is just one of the many stories that Pioneering Death exhumes from our haunting past.

Peter Boag is professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He is author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, and Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon. His latest book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon is available now.

A Gift of Peace and Quiet: Judy Bentley on the West Seattle Greenbelt and “Hiking Washington’s History”

Armed with more than two hundred white plastic bags, neon-clad neighbors gather at the West Seattle Greenbelt trailhead on a cold, sunny morning in late February 2021. Their mission is to make a trail visible from more than five hundred feet above. At precisely 8:45 a.m., a helicopter will circle the greenbelt with Jean Sherrard’s camera peering out, photographing the bright white squares revealing the trail through the overhanging branches. Sherrard and Clay Eals are preparing a Now & Then column for the Seattle Times.

Photo by Christine Clark.

The bags are the brainchild of Paul West, a member of the West Duwamish Greenbelt Trails group, who brings an ample supply from Puget Ridge Cohousing. (With only a few splotches of mud, the bags will be carefully collected and folded for reuse.) The volunteers start down the trail in small groups to drop their “bread crumbs” ten feet apart. As the temperature climbs above the mid-thirties, the white helicopter circles three times against a clear blue sky, above the waving Hansels and Gretels.

Looking south over part of the West Duwamish Greenbelt. Photo by Jean Sherrard.

In the resulting aerials, the people are mostly invisible and the bag trail is faint, but the views of the ridge on the highlands between the Duwamish Waterway and Puget Sound are stunning. The green fields of South Seattle College and the Riverview playfields frame the greenbelt. Industrial companies hug the river, colorful containers park at port terminals, the First Avenue South Bridge spans the river, and a belt of late-winter brown separates commerce from neighborhoods.

Looking west to the West Duwamish Greenbelt. Photo by Jean Sherrard.

Glacier action that left rocks resistant to erosion created the greenbelt ridge more than sixty thousand years ago. A conifer forest of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and Sitka spruce grew on its slopes.

The Duwamish people lived below the greenbelt along the Duwamish River and its tributaries for centuries; the earliest archaeological record places a village on the river as early as AD 500. As settlers and land developers moved in, the Duwamish were dispossessed, but the spirits (and bodies) of their ancestors live on in the soil and the trees.

A 1920 aerial photo shows the same ridge but with fewer trees. Puget Mill Company extracted what they wanted from the ridge before donating twenty acres to the City of Seattle in 1912 for a park at the north end. The same photo shows Boeing Plant 1 sitting at the foot of Highland Park Way. The newly straightened and dredged river is visible below the tip of an airplane wing. A streetcar line, which ran from the tip of the Duwamish Peninsula south to new communities, shows faintly on the ridge. The green line indicates trails in the 2021 greenbelt.

An aerial photo taken in 1920. Courtesy the Boeing Company.

In the decades after 1920, a brickyard dumped kiln dust on the hillside, neighbors dumped trash, a gravel company mined sand and gravel, and the Seattle Department of Engineering acquired property to build Soundway, a proposed freeway from the First Avenue South Bridge to suburban areas of Burien and southwest Seattle. The state located one of three Seattle community colleges at the top of the ridge in the late 1960s.

“There is no place in the city of Seattle where a buffer between industry and residences is more badly needed,” wrote the unnamed author of a 1970s report advocating the ridge’s preservation under the city’s Urban Greenbelt plan. “It should be left to the following generations as a gift of peace and quiet in our busy, noisy, polluted city.”

Through gradual property acquisitions and the activism of citizens, the greenbelt became that gift—at five hundred acres, it is the largest contiguous forest in the city. The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and countless volunteers have replanted and restored the forest and created a few good trails and more than a few social trails pounded by hiking boots and running shoes.

Trailhead at Fourteenth Avenue SW and SW Holly Street. Photo by Judy Bentley.

One of those trails is featured in the expanded second edition of Hiking Washington’s History by Judy Bentley and Craig Romano. Although this trail was not in use as an indigenous trail for thousands of years, it crosses an ancient landscape in the industrial heart of the state’s largest city. That makes it historic.

Judy Bentley taught Pacific Northwest history at South Seattle College for more than twenty years and is an avid hiker and author of fifteen young adult books. Her latest book, co-authored with Craig Romano, is Hiking Washington’s History, Second Edition.

UW Press Eagerly Awaits Tri-West Virtual Book Exhibit with a Round-Up of New Regional Titles

We are eager to connect with our regional book buying community during the Tri-West Virtual Book Exhibit, a combined event for three regional booksellers associations. Please visit our virtual booth here.

For those interested in booking an appointment with one of our sales representatives during the virtual exhibit, we are represented in the following territories by:

Kurtis Lowe
kurtis@booktravelerswest.com
Pacific Northwest (AK, ID, MT, OR, WA)

William Gawronski
wgawronski@earthlink.net
West (AZ, CA, NM, NV)

Kevin Kurtz
kk2841@columbia.edu
Midwest (CO, KS, NE, OK, SD)

We have many exciting regional titles that we are looking forward to sharing with local bookstores. Here is a collection that highlights some of these important new books:

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

By Daudi Abe

Foreword by Sir Mix-A-Lot

“A vital and long overdue survey of how this great city in the Pacific Northwest sampled and remixed an art form born on the East Coast and made it their own. Abe has crafted a work that not only presents hip hop in Seattle, but also is the biography of a community that learned how to win on its own terms.”—Kevin Powell, author of When We Free the World and a forthcoming biography of Tupac Shakur

The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West

By Rob Chaney

“Chaney writes with pith and pizzazz, and goes deep into understanding nature’s difficult relationship with people. This book is an incisive and motivating look into the future. It asks whether these brown bruins can be tolerated at levels reflecting their biological needs, meeting shifting ecological landscapes and our diverse American cultural pathways.”—Joel Berger, author of Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World

Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: The Pacific Northwest and British Columbia

By Collin Varner

Published with Heritage House

A concise regional guide to more than 200 plants with nutritional and medicinal uses. Practical and user-friendly, Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast is an indispensable guide for beginning and experienced foragers alike.

Birds of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Guide, 2nd Edition

By Tom Aversa, Richard Cannings, and Hal Opperman

Published with Heritage House

“An essential reference for birders west of the Continental Divide , particularly for intermediate and advanced observers.”—Western Birds: The Quarterly Journal of Western Field Ornithologists

After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens

By Eric Wagner

“This is a superb look at scientists and science at work.”—Publishers Weekly

“Like the seeds of lupine, Mount St. Helens is fortunate that such a writer landed on its soil, turning desolation into fertile ground.”—Natural History Magazine

Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas

By Gerry Smyth

Illustrated by Jonny Hannah

Published with the British Library

Reintroduces the traditional sea shanty for a new generation. Recently released films such as Fisherman’s Friend and Blow the Man Down demonstrate a reinvigorated interest in this long-standing maritime tradition, and Gerry Smyth is well-positioned to present this compilation of sea shanties, their backgrounds, and their accompanying musical notation.

The Great Quake Debate: The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

By Susan Hough

“Hough is the ideal author for this story, being a seismologist herself, steeped in the history of her trade, and a masterful raconteur. Whether it’s how to reopen the economy after a pandemic or what to do about climate change, the great quake debate was a precursor to modern tussles between science and policy.”—Callan Bentley, geologist, Northern Virginia Community College

The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest

By Aaron Goings

“Persuasively challenges a century-long belief: did the maritime labor activist at the largest lumber port in the world really deserve an enduring reputation as a monstrous serial killer? Goings provides the defense that Billy Gohl never got in court. What a welcome labor history lesson from the Pacific Northwest!”—Karen Blair, editor of Women in Pacific Northwest History

The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish

By BJ Cummings

“An amazing historical reflection on the Duwamish River and surrounding lands, which also addresses the pollution that affected both Natives and settlers.”—Cecile A. Hansen, chairperson of the Duwamish Tribe

“Cummings brings the river and its history to life in a chronicle of colonization, neglect, and rebirth. A must-read for anyone who wants to know the story flowing through Seattle.”—David R. Montgomery, author of King of Fish and The Rocks Don’t Lie

Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail

By Ellen Waterston

“Readers of Oregon’s local history, advocates of the environment, and high desert dwellers on the left and right side of the aisle will connect with this book. In Waterston’s classic voice that imparts her immense research while speaking to readers like a friend, Walking the High Desert is an important addition to Oregon’s literature about place.”—Bend Magazine

Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin

By Shana Lee Hirsch

“An important early intervention in our understanding of how climate change affects restoration practice and environmental management globally.”—Rebecca Lave, Indiana University

The Whale and the Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska

By Julia O’Malley

Foreword by Kim Severson

Published with the Anchorage Museum

“Through this book, [O’Malley] doesn’t merely introduce us to Alaskan foods, she discovers the soul of Alaska itself.”—Anchorage Daily News

Tips for the Home Gardener: An Interview with Linda Chalker-Scott, Co-Author of “Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, Third Edition”

During the COVID-19 sheltering-at-home period, have you noticed an increased interest in home gardening?

Oh, wow, yes! Our Garden Professors Facebook group has been swamped with questions from new gardeners, and I’m glad I’ve got that group there to help provide science-based advice.

Is this interest mostly in growing edibles or ornamental plants?

It’s both, though I bet that vegetable gardens have the upper hand. But lots of people have been tackling long-term projects that they didn’t have time to do before, like removing lawns and putting in landscapes.

For beginning gardeners, what would be good projects to start with this summer?

I would really recommend building a raised bed system for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We put one in last year and it was fantastic. We put up a fence to keep out the four-legged critters and used our native soil to fill the beds. It takes some time to do this correctly but once it’s done, it requires little upkeep other than laying down a protective mulch over the winter to keep weeds out.

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Courtesy of Linda Chalker-Scott

What mistakes should beginning gardeners try to avoid?

Don’t try to do it all the first year! Choose something you really want to focus on—a vegetable garden, a pollinator garden, or some other relatively small project. It is going to take time and patience to do this right. Don’t expect instant gratification. Plants are living organisms, not design elements—and they will require proper planting and care to thrive.

Now that nurseries are beginning to reopen, should people expect most of the usual plant inventory to be available?

From my personal experience, it varies! As I expected from our local nurseries, the inventory got pretty slim after the spring rush. However, I’ve found that some garden centers at hardware or big box stores still have excellent selections and the quality can be surprisingly good. And again, work with the nursery or garden center if you are looking for something they don’t have.

Which plants are good to order by mail? Do you recommend particular nurseries?

Only seeds and bare root plants are consistently reliable for ordering by mail. You can look online for other options, but be aware that mailing live plants is difficult on the plants and you may not like what you receive. It’s best to work with a local nursery to order plants.

How can people living in apartments grow edibles and ornamentals? Which plants grow well in pots on apartment balconies? What are successful indoor plants? What kinds of pots are best?

Tropical ornamentals are great choices for house plants, as are cacti and succulents; temperate perennials and woody plants are not good choices, as most of them do best with low winter temperatures. Whatever you choose, you’ll just need to make sure you have the right exposure for your desired choices. If you have a balcony that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day, you can grow some vegetables though yields can be low with reduced pot size. I think herb gardens are the easiest to create. You can also grow many smaller trees and shrubs. You will need to protect the pots from cold weather, not only so ceramic pots don’t crack but so that roots don’t freeze.

You really can use any type of pot you want, inside or out. You need to ensure that there are drain holes and protect surfaces, either with saucers or cachepots on top of some sort of impermeable material. I like to buy single-glazed floor tiles and then glue cork on the bottom.

Which are the best plants for edible landscaping?

First, you’ll want to know that you can safely eat plants in your landscape, and the best way to find out is to do a soil test to be sure you don’t have lead or some other heavy metal in your soil. Assuming you don’t have a problem, then choose perennials and woody plants you like to eat that are also ornamental. Consider perennial herbs, rhubarb (there are several cultivars with attractive leaves), berry bushes (we have lots of natives in this group), and dwarf cultivars of tree fruits that can be espaliered or otherwise formally trained. There are even ornamental groundcovers with edible fruit.

Which drought-resistant native plants do you recommend for home gardeners in the Pacific Northwest?

A lot of this is personal aesthetics, but you can tell which plants are going to be drought-tolerant by looking at their leaves. Plants with small, thick leaves, with a waxy covering that appears to be gray-green or gray-blue, use much less water than those with broad, thin leaves. But do understand that even drought-tolerant plants need to be watered through their first year of planting to get roots established.

For people who want to stroll (socially distanced) through a park or garden to see the mature sizes and shapes of plants they’re considering planting at home, can you recommend a few places in the Pacific Northwest?

Here are places I’ve visited where you can see many native (and nonnative) trees and shrubs in their full glory. Of course, state and national parks will also have many of our more ornamental natives, but the environmental conditions in large tracts of land may not reflect those in a small urban landscape. More managed gardens are probably the best bet. For more information, just look at their websites online.

Seattle area:

  • Bellevue Botanical Garden
  • Bloedel Reserve
  • Heronswood
  • Kruckeberg Botanical Gardens
  • Washington Park Arboretum/UW Botanical Gardens

Tacoma area:

  • Lakewold Gardens
  • Point Defiance Park
  • Rhododendron Species Garden
  • Wright Park

Spokane:

  • Manito Park

Portland:

  • Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden

Vancouver/Victoria BC areas:

  • Butchart Gardens
  • The Gardens at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific
  • UBC Botanical Garden
  • Van Dusen Botanical Gardens

For people who want to support their local bee and bird populations, what are good landscape plants that provide pollen and seeds?

There are so many choices! There are great pollinator plant lists at websites such as Xerces. Don’t worry about having to use native plants (but do avoid any known invasive species). Wildlife is highly adaptable to their habitat and they learn to use new food sources. For the most part, the types of plants you choose because of their flower color and fragrance will be good choices for pollinators. And birds will eat just about any type of fruit. If you want to provide seeds without getting weed problems, you can cook seeds in the oven at 300°F for thirty minutes. This prevents germination but does not affect the nutrient content.

Linda Chalker-Scott is associate professor of horticulture and extension specialist at Washington State University. She cohosts the Garden Professors blog, and her books include Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, The Informed Gardener, The Informed Gardener Blooms Again, and How Plants Work.

 

 

Support Indie Bookstores: A Resource Guide

We are grateful to be based in a region that loves literature and supports a thriving literary ecosystem. Local independent bookstores are an integral part of this community. As many have been forced to temporarily close brick and mortar stores and move their operations online, we want to remind you how important it is to shop local right now. Buying a book or gift card during this unprecedented global crisis is a way to contribute to the longevity of our bookstore community.

If you are looking for a new book to read in the coming weeks, we encourage you to check with your favorite local bookstore to see if they are still open for business. If you live in the greater Seattle area, we have compiled the latest information on how to order from many of the local bookstores in our region. The below stores all have online, email, or phone ordering available.

 

Here are a few other ways to connect with and support local independent bookstores:

  • IndieBound: Online platform IndieBound is a longtime supporter of independent bookstores. Users can type in their address or zip code to final local stores in their area.
  • Bookshop: Many of your favorite indie bookstores are working with the new online platform Bookshop, which bills itself as an “online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community.” Bookstores that work with Bookshop earn 25% commission on sales and enjoy the accessibility of online bookselling.

Finally, keep in mind that though bookstores cannot currently host guests in-person for book launch events, panels, and readings, many are finding innovative ways to allow these gatherings to continue online. We are partnering with many of the independent bookstores in the greater Seattle area to facilitate these types of gatherings. As logistics are finalized, we will feature the event details and instructions to join on our events calendar. Additionally, we recommend you check the websites of your favorite indie bookstores or subscribe to their e-newsletters, in order to stay informed about upcoming virtual events.

We hope this list will help you remain connected to your local literary community. Happy reading from all of us at University of Washington Press.

 

On Stories to Which the Ending Is Already Known: Eric Wagner on “After the Blast”

In 2018, I published a book about some penguins in Argentina that are near and dear to my heart, and as a result I did a number of book talks hither and yon. Once people had run out of questions about the penguins during the Q&As, someone would often ask what else I was working on.

“I’m writing a book about Mount St. Helens,” I would say.

“Oh, interesting,” the person would say, and then they would pause. “So what are you going to say about it that’s new?”

“Umm…” I would say. At that point I was two years into my research for the book that ultimately became After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens. I was driving out to Mount St. Helens as often as I could, talking to the hordes of scientists who either worked there or had worked there in the past, reading dozens of their books and papers about the ways life around the mountain had responded to the 1980 eruption. All the information was new, at least to me, and I was struggling to wrap my head around it. As such, it was all I could do not to shoot a dirty look at the questioner and say something tart.

But I also understood where they were coming from. Truth be told, I had asked the same question myself. I grew up in Oregon a few hours from Mount St. Helens, and was familiar with the standard tale of the eruption, which went something like: Mount St. Helens erupted and left a moonscape behind, but then life came back more quickly than anyone expected. All of this had made me a little hesitant at first to pursue the project. I wondered whether I had anything new to say about a space already so well known.

Once I started reading and talking to folks, though, it was soon clear to me just how mistaken I had been to assume everything worth knowing about Mount St. Helens was known. Yes, life had come back more quickly than anyone expected. But just how it came back was fascinating, and full of fun, quirky details—of spiders ballooning into the blast area within hours of the eruption, of toads and fish that survived because they were drifting in icebound lakes, of a deep snowpack that was a savior for plants in one area but a killer in another, of flowers that showed up in the middle of desolate plains, giving them color. I loved learning all those little stories embedded within the one larger tale.

Exploring the relationship between people and Mount St. Helens was eye-opening as well; for notice how people are kind of left out of that standard tale. But our fingerprints are all over the landscape. Within weeks of the eruption, people were clamoring to replant large swaths of the landscape with thousands of fir seedlings. In other places, people scattered tons of flower and grass seed from helicopters in an effort to prevent erosion. (It didn’t really work, for what it’s worth.) Everyone was doing what they thought was best—some trying to reassert the human hand over the land, others arguing to let life find its own way. All those actions would help shape the biological community that thousands of visitors see when they go to the mountain. The blast area today is a reflection of those competing desires: to intervene and sculpt, to step back and watch.

Overall, the main thing I learned while writing this book was the degree to which the landscape at Mount St. Helens is still very much alive. I feel lucky to have been able to spend so much time on the mountain, hiking all over it with scientists who could reveal its beauty to me and explain it. They could not stop talking about how dynamic the environment was. Even now, forty years after the 1980 eruption—as I am writing these words—the landscape is continuing to change in unexpected ways. So what’s new at Mount St. Helens? Read the book and find out just how much!

Eric Wagner earned a PhD in biology from the University of Washington, writes regularly about animals and the environment, and is author of Penguins in the Desert and coauthor of Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish. He climbs Mount St. Helens annually. After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens is available now. Now through May 15th, all University of Washington Press titles are 40% off on our website.